home > SF > cons > Intuition: Eastercon '98

The 49th British National Science Fiction Convention
10-13 April 1998, Jarvis Piccadilly and Britannia Hotels, Manchester

GoHs: Ian McDonald, Martin Tudor, Connie Willis .

This year's Programme Book's cover again wins no awards for its artwork!

The Britannia and Piccadilly hotels exhibit changing hotel design brilliantly: Britannia has a marvelous broad central staircase, vertiginously running the entire height of the building, and a couple of inadequate lifts discretely off to one side. The more modern, but freezing cold, Piccadilly has a shabby back stairwell hidden in a maze of twisty little access passages, presumably because the three centrally positioned lifts are intended to be the only transport system to the ground floor (naturally the main entrance is on the first floor, in from the car park, not on the ground floor, in from the street). Lifts are designed for a steady trickle of passengers, not the entire population of the hotel changing floors every hour on the hour.

And why are the chairs always scrunched up too close together?

Many of the panels seemed rather ill-prepared, and so tended to meander a bit aimlessly, or re-cover well-covered ground. A panel needs a good chair, who can let the panelists talk when they're being interesting, but can fill in awkward gaps when the flow of ideas dries up, and can draw out some of the quieter panelists. And Intuition was a good name for this convention, being the faculty needed to work out where rather too many of the programme items had been rescheduled to, often annoyingly back in the other hotel where one had just run from. Quite a few items were cancelled completely, partly due to non-arrival of speakers, because much of the south of England was a few feet under water at the time...

Programme highlights

• GoH Panel: Why does SF exist?
• Iain M. Banks : Taking the Fantastic out of Fiction
• Panel: When the Aliens Land
• Panel: How to Save the Universe
• Connie Willis : Hollywood and the Novel -- and why she hates Titanic
• Panel: Another Fandom -- second hand car fandom is pretty weird, too
• Iain M. Banks and Peter Hamilton : The Empire Has Struck Back
• Amanda Baker , Anne Gay and Stan Nicholls : Sex in the New Millennium
• Ian McDonald GoH talk -- in an improv. comedy style
• Jack Cohen : Just How Likely are Alien Minds? -- on Figments of Reality
• Ian McDonald and Ken MacLeod : Growing the Future
• Dave Clements , Stephen Baxter and Connie Willis : The Despised Bastard Love Child
• Jack Cohen and John Meaney : I Sing the Body Eclectic -- on being human
• Colin Jack : The Future of Getting Into Space
• John Jarrold : Short Stories Never Sell
• Panel: Moving On -- to new homes
• Connie Willis : GoH talk -- hilarious, brilliant, and insightful
• Simon Bradshaw , Stephen Baxter , and Ken MacLeod : Closing the Doors to the Future
• Molly Brown and Connie Willis : I Just Make It Up...
• Ian Sorenson and Reductio ad Absurdum: A Complete Waste of Time -- just about every time travel character, joke and cliche, in a two hour play. Utterly brilliant.

GoH Panel -- Why does SF exist?

The role of SF in literature, science, the media, advertising, fandom, art, and elsewhere

• CW: First we invent something, then we use it for something different. The answer phone is now used to screen calls. Fax machines are used to order pizzas. Computers are used to play games. And as for TV...
• IMcD: We often invent lewd uses: cars for sex, porno Web sites, telephone chat lines. Once we get videophones, we'll get strip lines!
• Literary criticism is like a tapeworm: it needs a corpus to adhere to. But now it thinks that it is the cat, and that the cat is the worm.
• SF is the Universal Set of all possibilities. Everything else, romance, Westerns, mainstream, is a sub-genre. SF can look at contemporary events with perspective.
• If you walk into a room and announce which side of the abortion argument you are on, virtually no-one will hear what you say next. You want to write a story that leaks into people's subconsciousnesses, and 15 years later they wake up and say "Ohmigod, that was about X..."
• You can't write social commentary parody, because the real world is so bizarre. It is also impossible to parody the tabloids.

Iain M. Banks -- Taking the Fantastic out of Fiction

Iain M. Banks (SF writer) and his alter ego Iain Banks (mainstream writer) discuss crossing genres

• The "M" stands for "Menzies", pronounced "Ming-ies".
  • No "M" in The Wasp Factory , because the publisher thought it fussy, and had bad resonances with Rosie M Banks, a really bad novelist in Wodehouse.
  • Then got grief from my uncles, because Menzies is the family name.
  • Decided to put it in the SF, to help distinguish them (as well as putting "an SF novel" and a picture of a spaceship on the cover!)
• Of Use Of Weapons : I originally wrote it chronologically, but then Ken MacLeod said 'Why don't you put the climax at the end of the book?'. Brilliant idea! Why didn't I think of that?
• The non-SF works have some SF elements.
• The South Bank Show probably thought they were doing me a favour by not mentioning the SF. The excuse was that they had enough mainstream material.
• Mainstream pays better, and it's more interesting to write in two genres.
• The mainstream works don't repeat, but the SF ones keep returning to The Culture. I'm addicted. I have a love affair with the Culture. And it's easy to do.
• I love Consider Phelbas so much, I'd let anyone film it just to get it filmed. Player of Games is the only one optioned.
• Fifth Element was fabulous to look at, visually stunning -- but the plot was rubbish
• Screenplay writing is a very different skill -- more different than short story versus novel writing skills.

Panel -- When the Aliens Land

Are we projecting our worst qualities onto aliens?

• Hostile Aliens (As in War of the Worlds , or its remake, Independence Day ) are useful when it's hard to find PC enemies -- it's just writers being lazy
• Would we be overwhelmed/assimilated? Japan wasn't overwhelmed -- they absorbed only what they wanted. We would be able to provide them our consumerist artifacts.
• Aliens as Refugees/Nomads/Outcasts. Why are they refugees? What if they had polluted their own planet with all this tech they are now offering us? The Greens might stop us accepting it, but the 3rd World would.
• Cults and religions tend to take the long view. They might be the only ones with the motivation to make long interstellar journeys.
• Why are alien cultures always monolithic? A holdover from the "Soviet Bloc menace"? "All foreigners look alike"?
• When diplomacy exists between nations, to stop them fighting, it allows other cooperative organisations to exist, like International Telecomms Union for allocating bandwidth.
• Aliens as aggressive explorers. "The Meek will inherit the Earth. The rest of us are going to the Stars."
• Aliens as Tourists. We trade our culture, not our technology.
• We should not assume that the aliens that turn up are representative.

Panel -- How to Save the Universe

Why do we like blowing people up?

• Wanted -- a version of Quake with colleagues faces morphed over the monsters.
• Doc Smith used negaspheres and ravening beams to destroy planets; modern SF drops rocks on them!
• The only modern military SF not based on US carriers is the Honor Harrington series, based on the Napoleonic model.
• Star Trek is Military-Lite
• "Shoot the women first" -- standing orders in anti-terrorist organisations -- because they are more dangerous. Requires a much higher level of dedication to become one.
• "The Honour of the Regiment" is required to make soldiers do dangerous things.
• A lot of short stories are "firefighter" style, like Thunderbirds .

Iain M. Banks and Peter Hamilton -- The Empire Has Struck Back

Why are interstellar civilisations always empires?

• Alternative to Empire -- East India Co model. This depends how easy FTL is, and why you colonise.
• The Culture is not really an Empire. It uses statistics to prove it is interfering only for your own good. And it's not military -- unless you annoy it.
• Empires are popular because they give you individuals to write about. In practice, an Empire has a life of its own, and the Emperor is not that important, unless the Empire is growing rapidly.
• Aristocracy -- one person you trust -- helps if comms are bad or slow. Democracy requires good, fast comms.
• Empire can be advanced by the very colonists trying to get away from it!
• Empires need heroes, iconography and mythology. Who you pick as your heroes reflects your ideology. Also need a way of involving the common people in the Empire -- external threats help

Amanda Baker, Anne Gay and Stan Nicholls -- Sex in the New Millennium

The gory biological details

• Sex is to do with biology; gender is to do with social roles
• HIV and other STDs are forcing a new morality: is sex talked about more, but practiced less? Syphilis before antibiotics was just as dangerous as AIDS today.
• If you have sex with your clone, is that incest? masturbation?
• What if you can decide what sex you are going to be this month?
• Aldous Huxley: "It's sapiens to be homo".
• What moral right do infertile couples have to treatment in an overpopulated world?
• We are already seeing biological parents versus adoptive parents versus surrogate parents...
• Dolphins are great responsive partners, but afterwards, you both have to sleep in the damp patch!

Jack Cohen -- Just How Likely are Alien Minds?

mainly on Figments of Reality

• We tend to get biology wrong because we don't think about death. Starlings tend to die of "suffocation complicated by digestion" -- something eats them. Nearly all sexually reproducing animals die without reproducing.
• If we ran evolution lots of times, what kinds of things would happen?
  • Universals -- things that have happened many times -- would happen again. The four Fs: flight, fur, photosynthesis, mating. Going multicellular. Leaving the sea. Eyes. Intelligence.
  • Parochials -- things that have happened only once -- would probably not happen again. Pentadactyl limbs in particular.
  A different fish leaving the sea would give a different result. But you can't tell at the time which are the important events. "Ant country" looks like an infinite suburbia -- we can't say where "it" is happening.
• We require other people. A baby trains its mother by rewarding her with a smile. Symbiosis -- recursive relationships.
• Animal icons: sly and cunning fox; wise owls -- but only in Western culture. Animals icons are everywhere.
• Princess Diana had our ordinary "princess" icons (The Princess and the Pea, etc), which are not the same as Royalty's "princess" icons. She was pursuing the wrong icons.
• The Theory of Everything can be written on a T-shirt. Does it explain why, when you bought the T-shirt, you were given the wrong change?
• Extelligence: there's a very large amount of stuff outside us -- just consider a library. The "make a human being kit" interacts with the human being.
• Simplex, complex, multiplex explanations. SF fans "revel in the phase space around the actual".
• Many biologists have the simplex model "it's all DNA".

Ian McDonald and Ken MacLeod -- Growing the Future

any future must have its roots in the past

• In 1930, "life in the 1980s" was just technology slapped on the same social structures -- The Jetsons -- but it's the social stuff that has changed most. ( The Flintstones is funny, because they are finding technology equivalents with stone tools; with The Jetsons , they have the technology and just do it.)
• Bladerunner had old stuff in it -- any future will have a history.
• The present is littered with bit of the future that never came to pass -- tower blocks, etc.
• Failed futures: Betamax, Edsel
• Democracy, Socialism, Feminism, etc were obscure ideologies of the 19th century, mainstream ones of the 20th. So take equally 'dingbat' ideas of the 20th century, and make them important in the 21st. Eg, balkanisation, neo-tribalism, but with interest groups rather than geographical groups.
• SF gives vocabulary and terminology for dealing with new tech. It helps assimilation, even if the details are wrong.
• SF fans suffer from "Past Shock" -- we are so familiar with the future, we are surprised that some stuff has only just happened for real. Eg, most of us have been through the ethical debate on cloning -- we just never thought they'd use it to make sheep ! "Do SF Readers Dream of Identical Sheep?"
• Nanotech: families can be self-sufficient -- certain skills will be valuable, and so will land and time. Every PC user has the capability to wipe out humanity. Social immune systems to cope with people going 'postal'.
• A desirable society can't be monolithic -- need a place for the mavericks.
• Every socialist Utopia has slavery or forced labour somewhere.
• What would the literature of Utopia be? There tends to be a lack of libraries in utopias.
• One night, "Civilisation" passed the Turing test. The Egyptians realised I was the real player, and if they won, it would be the end of the game for them. It's the only thing that explains their strategy.

Dave Clements, Stephen Baxter and Connie Willis -- The Despised Bastard Love Child

the relationship between science and fiction

[one of the better prepared and run panels]

• C. P. Snow's Two Cultures: Arts versus Science: each despise the other. SF is an offshoot of both, despised by both?
• SF characters are often equally at home in mythology, maths, biology, ...
• In the past, both were valued: Newton thought he would be remembered for his commentaries on the Bible.
• Science education in schools is so dull and boring, and stops around 1900. No QM or relativity. Yet the students are wearing watches that use QM. (Nuffield syllabus is better -- but more expensive.)
• One can no longer be a "Renaissance Man" -- there is too much to learn even in a single field.
• Some scientists, even if they know nothing about a subject, are not intimidated by anything. If they don't know, they'll look it up. Others are very overspecialised, and know nothing about even closely related areas. A form of cowardice?
• There are good popular science books available nowadays.
• Melvyn Bragg used the radio show "Start the Week" so that he could learn about science.
• Many young SF writers are scared that if they get any science wrong, they will be mashed flat. So they put in none at all. But if you are trying , the "real" scientists will forgive you.
• A lot of people express interest in cloning, but not in genetic engineering. They don't know enough to know they are linked.
• The majority of the SF classics have very little overt science in them. They just "use the world" to tell human stories.
• English majors are not terrified of Thomas Hardy just because they don't understand techniques of rural farming.
• Nowadays SF is going "white" again, because authors are criticised for getting other ethnic groups "wrong". It's self-imposed censorship.
• One of the key things about the scientific method is making mistakes. If your experiment "doesn't work", you've learned something.
• Before you can terraform a planet, you have to dream of terraforming.
• SF isn't about predicting the future. It isn't even about guessing. It's about playing with possibilities . But you have to be trained to think constructively in this mode.

John Meaney -- I Sing the Body Eclectic

the ways there are to be human in science fiction

• using Australopithecines as servants.
• We can never say "this child is human, its parents are not".
• Biologists use many words, like "alive", that have no hard edges. There's no point in arguing over the edges. If you start trying to define these words, you get into terrible problems.
• A currency is a transaction in a 2D phase space: (currency, value). It will get more complex (eg EMU), not less.
• Everything alive now took 4 billion years to get here -- we are all products of evolution -- no one superior to another. It is just as correct to talk of the "man-like ancestor of the ape" as the "ape-like ancestor of man"; indeed, of the "man-like ancestor of the amoeba" as the "amoeba-like ancestor of man".
• Dawkins talks of the "thin veneer of civilisation" over the genes. That's like saying a word processor is just a thin veneer over the computer -- all those bits could just leap out at me!
• Embryos born under different gravity or other different conditions may be very different. It's not just the DNA, it's also the hardware the DNA runs on. Sending DNA into space doesn't matter -- the aliens won't know how to play it.
• Is it human to stay the same, or to get lots of wonderful prostheses to improve us?
• Disproof of telepathy: we each train our sense organs as we grow -- so even if we each have a grandmother cell, it's a different cell in each of us. But twins separated at birth do have a lot in common (eg, one in a 1000 people walk into the sea backwards, 2 pairs of twins do) -- concordance -- but in one case the concordance was due to the same sociologist testing them.
• There is no "conservation of complexity" -- there is more complexity in a developing feather than in the cells of the entire chicken, depending how you look at it. How much information is there in the utterance "Go to Canton and change trains"? -- most of the information is in the context, in the listener.
• DNA is both data and instructions. If humans were just "initial conditions and a program" we could duplicate one. But we develop. Starting from a simple egg, there is a cascade of changes. We are different at 25 from the way we were at 15.
• "It's human if you take your hat off to it."
• We can't predict the way people will think in 2000 years time. As the context changes, we change, and change the context further.
• 10% of our own body weight is bacteria.
• Lots of animals change their environment to suit themselves. But once we invented, say, insulin, we started evolving differently: previously diabetics could not reproduce, now diabetics are increasing at about 1% every 10 years.
• No modern ecologists talk about "balance" any more. The environment is not in equilibrium, and never has been. Think what a change photosynthetic bacteria had on the environment. And grass was pretty devastating.

Colin Jack -- The Future of Getting Into Space

how to get into space without being strapped to high explosive

• At the time of Apollo, we were promise an era of cheap space travel. But it's been $6000/kg ever since Werner von Braun -- the Shuttle is even more expensive, at $20000/kg. Even liquid hydrogen probably can't get much below $2000/kg.
• Exhaust speeds:
  • H-O: 4.8 km/s
  • H-F: 5 km/s
  • Nuclear thermal (like submarines): 8 km/s
  • metallic hydrogen: 16 km/s -- tricky to keep metallic!
  • antimatter: 300000 km/s -- need grams, currently manufacture an atom at a time
• Maybe we don't want a self-contained vehicle? Let's scrap the rocket -- there are plenty of other proposals. Sound physical principles, we just need the enabling technology.
• But not all ideas work
  • Gyroscopes are no good. They can climb field lines, but would need at least x100 bigger field before a superconducting coil could do it, and then the internal forces are too great.
  • Zero point energy rocket drive? Casimir effect -- accelerate a conducting plate in a vacuum to get a small force -- a very small force.
• External assist -- not all the propellant in the vehicle
  • Laser ablation -- 100 GW (which we can currently do for about 1 femto-second). It's difficult to focus in atmosphere, and 100 GW does rather tend to start convection currents!
  • Nuclear volcano -- explode an atom bomb in a big tank of water, and ride up on the jet of steam.
  • Microwaves -- beam it up with a phased array. It's easier to beam it through the atmosphere, but what to do with it at the spacecraft?
• Structures
  • Beanstalk -- needs to be long, 20000 miles, and very strong. Current materials break under their own weight at:
    • steel: 36 km
    • kevlar: 250 km
    • dynema polythene: 384 km
    • graphite whisker: 1246 km
  • Sky hook -- a few 100 miles long, a few times stronger than kevlar, in a circular orbit about the earth, spinning so the ends move at 8km/s relative to the centre point. As an end approaches the ground, it is relatively stationary, so just grab on. The tether loses orbital energy, but it can be powered with ion thrusters.
  • HOIST -- Horizontal Orbital Insertion Space Tether. Grab on to a cable trailing out the back of a spacecraft, and use "frictional force" -- electromagnetic eddy currents -- to accelerate you. Need to keep the cable very straight, and not actually touch it.
• Guns
  • Jules Verne's "Columbiad" gun. If you use a 'biconical' shape and non-ablating carbon, can pass through the atmosphere.
  • Gerard Bull's "supergun" -- needs huge accelerations
  • Rail gun -- electromagnetic propulsion. Tries to "sell" one to NASA as a "reverse wind tunnel" testing device, with stationary wind and a moving test object -- then would only have needed to leave the end wall off the tunnel!
  • Coil gun -- like a particle accelerator. Clever overlapping coils give a nice smooth acceleration. Snag: accelerates payload in about 1s, so consumes 10 GW for a small time. Need to store this energy. Nowadays possible to build very high energy density capacitors that can be discharged very rapidly.
    • Sandia proposed to build one on Hawaii -- nice straight sided mountains -- 400 kg to 6km/s at 30 degrees elevation -- 2250g acceleration. The cost per Joule is still rather high -- would need 1000 payloads before it paid for itself.
    • A very long launch track, say 100 miles long like Pikes Peak -- wouldn't need pulsed power -- could use US grid. 15g acceleration for a minute, payload of a few tons. Recent advances make this more feasible: insulation, large current switching semiconductors, heavy duty superconducting coils. $3000/kg for one launch a month, $130/kg for one launch a day, $1/kg at extreme high frequency launches.
• A lot of sane aerospace engineers are researching this sort of thing in their spare time.
• The civilian market is growing: commsat networks, weather/environmental surveying. There's a potential for launching several thousand satellites per year.
• Maybe the era of cheap exploration is nearly here!

John Jarrold -- Short Stories Never Sell

a polemic

• Even Iain Banks ' short story collection [ The State of the Art ] sold only about one-third that of his novels.
• Short stories are a training ground for novelists -- it helps you practice writing and selling. (But a novel isn't just a long short story.) Having published short stories, it's easier to get agents and publishers to take you seriously.
• 70-80% of the market is Fantasy, not SF. Some SF writers have been asking "will I sell more if I write my SF in Fantasy Quest style?" and the answer is yes. So expect to see more SF writers writing SF stories using Fantasy tropes. Also, the public tend to buy fatter books at the same price, to get better "value for money".
• There are more good SF books selling now than 7-9 years ago.
• The anthology/collection market is better in the US. Wonderful sales figures in the UK are merely average in the US. Can sell 50000 there, but maybe only 3000 here, which isn't enough. The Great Anthology Glut of the 70s helped destroy the market for a while; it's coming back slowly.
• Interzone haven't raised their word rate for about 10 years. Once you become an established novelist, short stories become a labour of love.
• It's easier to write a reasonable novel than a reasonable short story. And a reasonable novel will sell better than a wonderful short story.
• About 12% of the paperback fiction in the UK is F&SF, which is the largest subsection of the market. (Thrillers are 9%, as is Crime)
• Marketing spin is a s much to convince the trade to carry the book as it is for the public.
• Maybe what's needed is to make a glossy magazine like SFX take short fiction? Need to persuade the media in general to take SF more seriously. (Crime used to be in this state. But now P.D. James, Colin Dexter, etc can get reviews.) A lot of people in the book trade see SF as just Star Trek and Dr Who .
• Media SF -- aren't we as guilty of being elitist about this as the rest of the world are about us?
• "90% of all people who have a book in them should keep it there." Writing a book can be cathartic, but to be a published author, you have to write what sells (whilst keeping your individuality).
• Gets 40 books a week from slush pile, 30 from agents. Has bought 2 books from the slush pile in the last 10 years. The majority is badly written, badly typed, badly presented. Reads about 10 pages -- if not hooked by then, sends it back. Doesn't always have time to give a detailed critique.
• A story should have one new thing - the idea. It can use SF 'furniture' like FTL. It should not use another new thing to solve the problem with techno-magic.
• Audiences today are not interested in classic stories. In the past, could sell Hugo anthologies with old stories in them. (Also true of Crime. Penguin used to republish a lot more than they do now.) No "Classic SF" list does well.
• If I don't know an author, I'd rather pick up a collection. It gives me an idea of their range, and is easier to dip into. But you have to change mental gear at the end of each story.
• A short story has less background than a novel -- there's not room for everything. It has different pacing -- like the difference between an oil painting and a charcoal sketch. Short stories can be sharper and more vivid. They are perfect for making one point, perfectly. Some of these points might not be worth writing a whole novel to make.
• Fantasy shorts are harder, because it's harder to put in the background you need. There are some cliches you can use. Shared worlds help here.
• In a novel, it's easier to get away with infodumping in the "Chapter 2 Lecture". Can't get away with the "Paragraph 2 Lecture" in the short.
• When plotting, think in terms of the Whodunit: clues, red herrings, surprises. For pacing, think in terms of the Thriller. When writing, think in terms of "literature" and poetry, using the best words.
• A novel is a passage of time. Characters journey from here to there. A short story is a snapshot, or a single pivotal moment, or a strong vivid idea. A novel can get away with a weaker idea, by giving more depth, more background. In a short story, every word has to be right; a good novel can get away with rough patches.

Panel -- Moving On

what is the minimum we could take off planet to preserve our culture?

• Should we take the opportunity to winnow the publication dross? Each published paper has an average of 0.7 readers. Or should we take everything, and index it well? Or should we take nothing, and make a fresh start?
• Is SF fandom a viable culture? You'd need just paper mills, mushroom farms and breweries!
• A problem with having "everything in the computer": the colonists might think this is the best that could be done -- like the stifling Greek influence in the Middle Ages -- and end up with a culture of librarians.
• Need a team of "Mongolian Motor Mechanics" -- who can fix anything .
• A language group needs a minimum of 5000 native speakers to survive. So we are probably talking of a mono-culture.
• A mixed bag of colonists might have no shared culture except the shared mission imperative.
• Send a single island population, who have already survived together for generations. Or make the group live together for 10 years first?

Simon Bradshaw, Stephen Baxter , and Ken MacLeod -- Closing the Doors to the Future

recapturing the optimism that got us to the Moon

[one of the better prepared and run panels]

• Arthur C. Clarke : the transistor killed the manned space program. There's no need for maintenance crews to change the valves in a commsat.
• Many people think the virtual experience, watching it on the Web, is good enough.
• Every new advance in biology results in an ethics committee to stamp it out. There's a real worry that technophobia might stop, or at least delay, space exploration.
• Ariane 5 -- three years ago it was criticised for being too large -- now it's clear it is too small. The Iridium satellites required so many launches they saturated the launch capacity of three nations. But this rapid advance is short term, not long term research and exploration.
• The Shuttle is like a V2 with air-conditioning. The basic technology hasn't advanced at all. Compare Antarctica: Cook used a wooden ship, and predicted no-one could ever go further south. Then came steamships. Scott and Amundsen got to the South Pole, but only planted a flag. It took another 40 years to go there "in anger". We need a "steamship breakthrough", which can put the technology in ordinary hands.
• There appears to be a beginning of a backlash against the anti-technologists. The Channel 4 series Against Nature and the BBC2 series Scare Stories . It is interesting to see that such programs could be made at all.
• Surprised not to see a "Preserve the Moon Water" campaign yet. We'll never terraform Mars -- we could never get the Environmental Impact statement through. Anyway, the planets are so intrinsically interesting in themselves, maybe we shouldn't terraform them. Go for the asteroids.
• The danger is that space exploration research is required to be summarisable as a 30 second sound bite.
• When the 2028 asteroid was first announced, there were probably a lot of people rubbing their hands together saying "Yes! We'll need a really big space program..."
• The overcrowding of geostationary orbit is important enough to kickstart companies into thinking of more ideas. Having the infrastructure to maintain the satellites could help bootstrap further exploration.
• There are 10,000 people already willing to spend $100,000 to go into space. If Mir were more reliable, there would be tourists there now .

Molly Brown and Connie Willis -- I Just Make It Up...

the value of research

• Much research material is written by academics for people with prior knowledge. Imagine trying to research Regency England if you didn't even know what the Regency was! For really new stuff, you might have to start with children's primers.
• I don't like the Middle Ages. I only set Doomsday Book there because that was when the Black Death was. It's the details that are difficult. A character looks out the window -- what were windows made of? Can't assume anything . Had mittens been invented? Were they knitted? Made of rabbit fur? Fur inside or outside? ...
• Some things you just cannot find out. You have to change the scene, or get vague.
• The research can give parts of the plot. You have to do your own research, because only you know what you are looking for -- the details to drive the story and give it shape. You may not recognise it until you find it. Example: you knew the plague was coming when you heard the funerals being tolled increasingly, and then the bells stopped -- so the church passed a law to silence the bells.
• There's no such thing as "too much research". But you are not writing a treatise -- you are trying to transport yourself to that time. If you get something wrong, it can kick the reader right out of the story. And the more stuff you get right, the more the mistakes stick out.
• Don't put in details that have nothing to do with the story. If you want to show off your research, put it up on a Web site . And there's loads of research material available on the Web: Constitution of the Roman Republic, Plutarch's Life of Corilanus,... What's on the Web isn't always accurate, but it's usually obvious what's okay, and what's crackpot. (But crackpot sites have great story ideas!) But even different reference books have different "facts".
• There is a danger of getting blocked by too many details closing down some possibilities.
• Sometimes you find stuff that's too good to be true, and can't use it, because no-one would believe it. Fiction has to have a level of plausibility, not too many coincidences. You couldn't write a fictional "Titanic" -- real life has very bad plotting!
• "But then I look at Hollywood, and wonder why we bother?"
• Fully intended to set Doomsday Book in the summer, with a harvest scene. Then discovered the plague hit that area in winter. So I changed the story.
• Research cannot save you. The story is what's important. Readers are more willing to forgive technical errors than poor stories.